


That's a Funny Story

by Anonymous



Category: The Hateful Eight (2015)
Genre: Developing Relationship, Huddling For Warmth, Intercrural Sex, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-11
Updated: 2017-02-11
Packaged: 2018-09-23 05:51:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9643340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Two bounty hunters walk into a relationship.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [linndechir](https://archiveofourown.org/users/linndechir/gifts).



> Happy Valentine's Day!
> 
> OK, additional content notes: period-typical racism and plentiful rape references, but still milder than the actual movie.

They turned their bounties over to the sheriff of Red Rock—

“I can’t help but get distracted,” Warren said, “by how much this fellow ain’t you.”

“A man with decent manners wouldn’t keep bringing it up,” Mannix said. “A white man wouldn’t, Major.”

“There ain’t any kind of rule that says the two of you have to have this argument every damn time,” the sheriff said. “There ain’t even any kind of rule that says you have to keep coming back here. Circuit court judge has got a jurisdiction wider than one fucking town. Jesus Christ, I feel my eyes get bloodshot the minute you two walk through the door.”

He slid seven thousand dollars across the table to them.

“Do me a favor,” he said, “and maybe take your shit somewhere else for a while.”

\--

The circumstances behind that conversation dated back to the blood-hazy aftermath of the massacre and miracle at Minnie’s, which was what the newspapers called it on account of being fonder of alliteration than dogs were of licking their own balls. To wit, the two of them getting their half-dead asses hauled out by a Santa Claus-looking son of a gun in what Warren would have figured for the Christmas miracle it tended to get written up as if either of the two of them had been the kind of person that sort of thing was likely to happen to. As it was, the man was a drunk who’d taken half the bottles out of the bar along with their slack-limbed selves. But miracle or not, they woke up in Red Rock crammed in a bed together and tacky with each other’s blood. There was a walrus-mustached man with sad bloodhound eyes looking down at them.

“You boys rest easy,” he said, “unless you killed all those people back there, in which case don’t, but I don’t figure you did, so, on that assumption, I got some more laudanum for you to drink.”

“Oh, thank merciful God,” Mannix said, and lurched for the dropper like a butterfly for a flower.

Warren held off a little longer, squinting at a gleam he could barely make out in the dark of the room. “You the doctor?”

The man shook his head, and the gleam resolved itself into a brass star. “Nah,” he said. “Doc’s busy with a sick kid. I’m the sheriff.”

“Of Red Rock,” Warren said, not a little pointedly.

“Sure of Red Rock.”

“I did intend to get to that,” Mannix said. He put his head back against the pillow. “But you have yourself some dope and forget all about it, Major. It comes highly recommended.”

Warren had his dope, but he didn’t forget all about it, and the next day, with the two of them propped up against the headboard and their wounds knitting and Mannix fussing about how he wanted a separate bed and it wasn’t decent for them to be crammed in together, he decided this sheriff shit would make for a decent winter’s entertainment if he were stuck in bed the whole while.

“First and final act as the sheriff of Red Rock,” he said.

“Well, it was, wasn’t it?”

“I could sentence your lying ass to hang as my first and final act as a county judge, but it wouldn’t really mean shit, would it?”

And on and on like that for days, needling and doping, needling and doping, until one day he woke up with Mannix still conked out and snoring in his ear. It was about the only privacy he’d had in days, which meant he finally had the silence and the presence of mind to think about the kind of hole all this would be eating in his funds. Santa Claus, after all, had taken possession of all the bodies—it was supposed to be in bad taste for them to hold a grudge about that, but one of the things they were for sure and for certain united on was that they didn’t give a shit about bad taste, they gave a shit about being deprived a small fortune they’d paid for almost with their lives. Anyway, they were both going to be in hock for this. And he'd be damned if he'd end up paying it all alone.

He kicked Mannix awake.

“Pancakes,” Mannix said sleepily, opening his eyes. “Major? What is it?”

“Not pancakes, that’s for damn sure. Did you come here with any cash?”

“Yeah,” Mannix said. “I’ve been meaning all this time to tell you I’m a secret fucking Rockefeller.” He rubbed his eyes and managed to limp over to the dresser and pour a glass of water for himself and, without being asked, one for Warren, too. He hobbled back, spilling half of it, which lessened the gesture down to the point where Warren was getting two inches of lukewarm water and didn’t feel he needed to say thanks for it. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking we’ve been roomed, boarded, stitched, fed, watered, and doped for, so far as I can tell, two weeks, and I don’t know that anyone here’s a good Samaritan.”

“That’d be something.” Mannix gulped his water down and burrowed back under the covers, awfully up-close and cozy for a man so insistent on getting his own room. “We’re on the mend anyhow, at least. They’ll just have to take an IOU for what we can’t cover. What else are they gonna do about it?” He grinned and elbowed Warren in the side like they weren’t both still so sore that every knock felt like it came from a sledgehammer. “We ain’t neither one of us pretty enough to get whored out.”

“Ha,” Warren said, though it was a forlorn hope that Mannix was smart enough to get that him saying “ha” meant that he wasn’t really laughing. “And how do you figure on paying that writ off, hillbilly?”

Mannix made a face and then brightened up again not two seconds later, looking over at Warren with eyes so hopeful it about seemed he’d grow a tail and start wagging it.

“Hell no,” Warren said.

“I think it’s worth thinking about,” Mannix said. “I think you and me went up against five trained killers and a fucking ambush and came out not so much the worse for wear.”

“Anything you think is worth thinking about ain’t worth thinking about.”

“Lincoln letter.”

“You can’t use that as a fucking trump card.”

“Why the hell not? If I had a nickel for every time you said I wasn’t the sheriff, I’d be able to pay our fucking bills and we wouldn’t be having this fucking conversation in the first place. And I figured that out on my own, I didn't just have Lincoln himself swan up and say he ain't seen your black ass before in his life.”

“The Lincoln letter wasn’t hot-shit deduction on your part,” Warren said. “The Lincoln letter was you being in that tiny little intersection of fellows who knew I had it and who knew what I’d done. You were an accident of circumstances, Chris Mannix. Don’t preen, that ain’t a fucking compliment.”

But Mannix’s one damn talent was being an accident of circumstances—it must have been, because over the next couple of days, he somehow wore Warren down into agreeing. He didn’t know what it would be more embarrassing to think, that Mannix had convinced him or that he’d gotten sentimental about the fact that if he squinted at it a certain way Mannix had maybe saved his life. The prudent thing was to keep the matter of why he’d gone and said yes from coming up at all. So he let Mannix run his mouth and he shot him down as much as he could and the two of them got better, paid what they could, and signed their IOU. It was something like the middle of February when they were free and able-bodied again.

They did work well together. Warren kept meaning to be surprised by that, but he never really got around to it.

Maybe because his time got eaten up being surprised by the other thing.

It started going wrong for them as early as the first week of March. Mannix had been long-faced for weeks about how stubbornly the cold was hanging on, like it was a fresh surprise to him every sunrise that Wyoming wasn’t South Carolina. Every day that was tolerable at noon perked him up some and every night when it fell cold again like clockwork he acted like the weather had stabbed him right in the back. The first couple times it was funny. Then there was a stretch where Warren cocked a gun at him every time he brought it up.

He should have fired it. Hell, if Mannix had lied about being the sheriff, he could have lied about there not being a bounty on his ass, as well-acquainted as he was with trouble, so a bullet in his head might even be profitable.

But even if it didn't make him a penny, he still should have done it, because then it was late March, nighttime, with low-hanging clouds threatening some kind of freezing rain before too long, and there weren’t any stars and there wasn’t any moon for them to get much of a look at each other. Which had to be part of it. They had their camp beds squashed up next to each other and Mannix’s shivering was keeping Warren awake. Without opening his eyes, he said, “Chris Mannix, if you so much as twitch one more fucking muscle, I’m going to knock you over the head with a rock until you pass out and lie fucking still.”

“Major, I can’t help it. This state ain’t any kind of decent state at all.  Snow in fucking March. Y’all could have kept _this_ part of the country and not done anybody any harm at all.” Another all-body shiver, this one kind of argumentative somehow, like he thought Warren could have made it warmer if he’d really wanted to but was just keeping it cold to spite him.

Warren sighed and yanked his blanket back. Mannix looked at the gap like it was a crevasse that had just opened up in the earth itself.

“Come in or don’t but I ain’t holding it open all night.”

“I guess we all did it once or twice during the war,” Mannix said, like bringing up the war didn’t risk changing Warren’s mind any, and even though he sounded reluctant, he rolled over lickety-split and tumbled in, yanking his own blankets with him and tucking them all around until they were both cocooned together in wool and fur that smelled wet and musty for weeks after every storm. He sighed, contented as a man by the fire with his feet up. “That’s better, Major, ain’t it?” Like it had been his own idea.

“No, it’s worse, but it’s warmer.”

“We’ll sleep like infants cradled in our mothers’ arms.” He turned on his side, facing away. “You did do this back in the day too, right?” Sounding suddenly doubtful.

“What, you thought I came up with it right now, the first man to ever think of two bodies being warmer than one?”

“That ain’t what I’m saying. I mean—that’s something people do when it’s cold, that’s all I mean. _Lots_ of people.”

Warren couldn’t make sense of him at first and then he had the uneasy suspicion that he could. So Chris Mannix had good reason to think huddling up wasn’t ordinary, and didn’t that bring back memories. He hadn’t done anything like it since the war; hadn't even shared bedding with another man at all since the war. Getting the idea in his head was the whole problem, because he’d laid in bed beside Mannix for weeks without it ever crossing his mind, because what was there to think about? Enormous fucking nutcracker teeth and a climbing hairline and pink skin. That first week, still so fucking jumpy at creaking floorboards and nearby footsteps, he'd kicked the son of a bitch awake a time or two, but just to make sure he was still alive enough to back him up if it came to that. A boot in the shin the only time he'd willingly touched him.

Even thinking about it like he was right then and there, the only advantage he could tease out of it was getting warmer still. And he was warm enough already, which should have settled the matter.

But he reached over anyway and put his hand in the small of Mannix's back.

“Ah,” Mannix said. Then: “Oh.” Like he’d been given a list of vowels to learn his letters.

It was quick and they didn’t talk about it. Mannix rolled back to face him but got by without really looking at him by ducking his head down. As much as he fumbled around getting Warren's pants down, he might even have had his eyes closed. Maybe he thought Warren would be less black for him not seeing it, like a dick unseen was the same as a dick untouched. His hands were clumsy until the end, when he seemed to find some surety somewhere or at least opened his fucking eyes. It shouldn't have gotten him off, that rough-handed reluctance that was all the same still so fucking eager, but it did. He thought about Mannix taking hold of knives and pistols and the scratchy rope that'd done the job for Daisy. Killing hands given over to him. He liked it more than he wanted to.

Warren touched him too and couldn’t have explained why if his life had depended on it. Mannix made little noises in the back of his throat when he was near coming and so Warren turned him around again so all his stuff would get on the blanket instead of on him, so he wouldn't be covered in white boy come. Turned him around but pulled him back, too, so he could feel those muscles tighten, twitch, spasm.  The whole length of Mannix pressed up against him: his chin on Mannix's shoulder and his nose in Mannix's hair, Mannix's bare ass pressed against his still-sensitive cock.  When he came, he made even more noise than he'd been making before, and Warren could feel the echo of it in his chest.

Then there was nothing but quiet and the sounds of the two of them getting back into their drawers. Buttoning their pants up again.

That was more or less what it was like for the rest of the winter. During the day, they’d ride and kill people and complain about the little steak-and-eggs-and-a-shot shacks that were all that county had in the way of restaurants. The steak tasted like horse and the eggs tasted like rubber. Minnie would have done them up a better spread than that, Warren sometimes thought and didn’t say, and on the nights he thought it, he was rougher or else just more fucking stupid, either leaving bruises or else making Mannix come while they were still facing each other, their sweaty foreheads pressed together, their knuckles banging together hard as they jerked each other off, him staring hard at Mannix's closed eyelids. Fuck him anyway, he was the one who whined and begged when he was close, for all he was ashamed of it. Let the asshole pretend _that_ away.

They would do all that night after night and circle back to Red Rock to put a little more money down against that note they were carrying. While they were there, they’d sleep in separate rooms and to hell with the expense. Out in the country, where it would have been free, they didn’t. It was just the way it was. Warren had done things like it before, even if none of those things had lasted this long or been with white men who said they were gonna burn every henhouse they saw so they wouldn’t have to eat any shitty eggs again for a month and who may actually have fucking meant it.

Mannix started keeping his eyes open more. In the house of a man they'd killed, Warren shoved him up against a wall and put one hand on his throat and the other on his cock. In a stagecoach with bodies lashed to the roof and the driver cheerfully whistling up ahead, Mannix reached over and undid Warren's belt and gave him a lazily slow handjob without ever breaking his incessant yammering until Warren was right on the edge: then he bent down and took the head of Warren's cock in his mouth. Swallowed every drop. He claimed he didn't want to make a mess of the coach and that was all it was.

They were overdue for wanting to kill each other, but when they eased back into that groove, it didn't go how he would have thought.

“I think the nights are getting warmer,” Warren said one day, late April or maybe early May. He’d lost track. They’d been out on their own for a while and the worrisome part of it was that they hadn’t even shot anybody in a week or so.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Mannix said, bristling up.

“You’re beyond any help if you don’t know what ‘getting warmer’ means. That’s basic English.”

Mannix scowled. “Thirteen men, you know that? Thirteen fucking bounties.”

“Glad to see your arithmetic’s better than your vocabulary. Yeah, we’ve turned in thirteen.”

“One or two of them not even uglier than sin,” Mannix said. “One or two more than that with faces that at least didn’t look like busted up fucking accordions. I guess I must have missed it, you making them suck you off before you shot them.”

He couldn't see the relevance of it. “Five of them you killed yourself,” he said calmly. “Did I miss anything there?”

“Fuck you, Major, I don’t do that shit. _You_ do that shit. Do it and brag about it just to stir up some poor fucking old man.”

“First of all,” Warren said, feeling like his jaw was too tight for the amused-all-too-hell smile he was after, “I think you’re maybe forgetting that that poor fucking old man didn’t say word one about assholes underneath the floor or assholes right there in the room, not even to you when you were practically licking his boots. And I also think you’re forgetting that I don’t give a shit about your opinion on who I kill or don’t, or what I do or don’t with them beforehand. Like you think you've got shit to do with it. As far as Smithers goes, I’d put a bullet in the son of a bitch again if he were here right now, and if I didn’t have his son to tell him a tale of, I’d tell him a tale of you instead. Though maybe that wouldn’t matter. Like I said, if we’re talking about people who didn’t care an owl hoot about you one way or the other, Sandy Smithers just barely comes second to me.”

He waited for Mannix to have some kind of reaction to that but then Mannix, being Mannix, had the wrong one: “That old bastard, I never did even think of that. One little whisper from him, Major, and the two of us maybe could have been sitting pretty and not getting our _asses_ shot up.”

“There you go.”

“Shit, if he was here and you didn’t kill him, I’d do it myself.” He frowned. “What were we talking about?”

“Some hissy fit you were throwing,” Warren said. “On account of me saying it was getting warmer.”

“I just think—”

“What would you do if I did?”

Mannix looked at him and didn’t say anything.

“I mean it,” Warren said. “Ask yourself that question, Mannix. If I put a gun to some asshole's head and put my dick in his mouth, what would you do about it? That something you want to see? I suppose I’d let you watch, since we’re partners. Or are you saying you'd try to stop me?”

“You got to leave me the fuck alone,” Mannix said, red-flushed and wild-eyed, and then he went over and got down on his knees. He looked up at Warren. “This ain’t right, Major.”

Warren ran a hand along Mannix’s jawline: felt his stubble, felt his throat move when he swallowed. He had a look to him sometimes that made Warren want to look at him longer.

He said, “I suppose sometimes the nights still got a bit of a chill to them. Wyoming, after all.”

\--

Thirteen dead men, less expenses, paid off their debt to the good people of Red Rock, but as going somewhere else on the regular would have meant missing a prize opportunity to mock Mannix about his bullshit, Warren very nearly made himself a citizen. So things went on.

And they stopped paying for separate rooms. It seemed like a waste of money, now that they were making it for themselves.

The weather did get warmer, but it took until July for it to get truly fucking uncomfortable for them to be sharing blankets at night. It would be cool again by September, which wasn’t long to go without something he’d never wanted in the first place, and if he did want it still, maybe he could say they were at the point of admitting that they could just do the fucking thing and then go to their separate beds. No more elbows in his ribs. No more stale breath in his face first thing in the morning.

But all he did was spread the blankets out a little more so they wouldn’t be so much on top of each other, so it would be cooler. Hell, the first night he did that, they didn’t even screw any. Go figure.

\--

Which brought him back to the sheriff asking if they wouldn’t pretty-please go someplace else.

“I thought that was rude,” Mannix said that night, though whatever offense he’d taken hadn’t stopped him from counting their money twice and petting each dollar like he thought it was going to up and do a trick for him. “We bring the bastards in as good as anybody else—hell, better. Major, you can’t sleep in the middle of the fucking bed, I got no room.”

Warren shifted over maybe a quarter of an inch. “I could give you the whole bed and sleep in the chair and I think I’d still wake up with you half on top of me.”

Mannix stretched himself and yawned right in his ear with no consideration. “I get cold, dammit.”

Which was horseshit, since whenever they found a hotel they were both so glad to not be out in the wide open that they both slept naked as the day they were born; were both naked right then with no gooseflesh on either one of them. But it twigged something for him.

“I just realized something,” he said.

Mannix rubbed his eyes. “Can you realize it in the morning?”

“We ain’t on your timetable, we’re on mine. And I just realized that I don’t have the faintest notion how the hell your shivers-himself-silly-at-a-crosswind ass ended up in snowy Wyoming if you didn’t come all this way to be sheriff of Red Rock.” Occurring to him like that it had given him a funny, unwanted sense of vertigo, which was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard of. Though it'd make a good image for another Lincoln letter, now that he thought about it: _I find I stand looking down the cliffs of possibility to how close we've all come to destruction._

And he had Chris’s goofy, suddenly nervous smile to distract him from the feeling, too, and that worked better than any composition.

“Now, that’s a funny story, Major. I mean, in a minute or two, you’re gonna agree it’s a funny story. It’s such a funny story it should really just wait till the morning so you won’t keep yourself awake all night laughing. You want a blowjob? I can give you a blowjob, get you so tuckered out you’ll go right to sleep.”

Warren raised his eyebrows and waited. Mannix never knew what to do with quiet: he’d talk himself to death trying to avoid it.

Mannix scooted away from him a little, putting himself all the way over on the edge of the bed. “I mean, Major, you got to consider the circumstances, that’s all I’m saying! What with my daddy passing and all, and it being pretty nearly his dying wish—”

Warren wound his finger around in the air: _get to the point_.

“--Jobs scarcer than hen’s teeth, and person can’t ride and raid forever, you know, he starts to think about settling down somewhere. And they were still saying they’d pay it out, hell, that all those boys' fathers would pass a hat if they had to, and five thousand dollars seemed like a fair bit of money. Now, that’s funny. You got to admit that’s funny, don’t you?”

“Chris Mannix.”

“Yes, sir? You sure you don’t want that blowjob? I don’t mind. You don’t even got to—”

“White boy. Shut the fuck up.”

“Yes, sir.” That lasted a good three, four seconds. “You ain’t mad, are you? Major, I didn’t know you from Adam. I mean, I knew who you were, but I didn’t know _you_ , it wasn’t personal or nothing.”

He had no intention of taking Mannix off the hook that easily: let his cracker ass flop around a while with his mouth gaping open as stupid as could be. But the awful truth was he did like it, at least a little. It was like they’d been bullets shot at each other from opposite ends of the country, and in their line of work, that told the cliffs of possibility to go fuck themselves, that was as close to destiny as bushwhackers ever came.

For that matter, he hadn’t been sure the bounty was still at five thou, it having been a few years since the Smithers boy, who was the last one he’d seen. He was kind of pleased by that. He knew he should have been hoping it had gone down further, to discourage them a little, but he liked killing those peckerwoods too much for that.

Mannix had used the enforced silence as time to double-down on his stubbornness, because then he said, “Well, I’ll say I’m sorry if you want, but I ain’t gonna let you lie there and act like you wouldn’t have killed _me_ for five thousand dollars, or two, or _one_. For fucking free for that matter. Now, the past is the past, major, and—”

“Your Lost Cause-worshipping self didn’t just tell me the past was the past, did you?”

“If you’ve got some particular combination of words you’d like to hear—”

“Come over here,” Warren said, jerking his head. “Quit pussyfooting over on the other side of the bed.” He patted his thigh.

Mannix eyed Warren’s lap like it was a lion’s mouth he was putting his head into, but he did come across that gap and straddle him, knees to either side of Warren’s thighs. Warren put his hands on his ass; dug his fingers in a little.

“How do you think that would have gone?” Warren said. “You with your gun, walking up my mountainside. You think you’d have gotten the drop on me?”

“No, sir. No, I wouldn’t say that.”

“So I’d catch you, that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Yes, sir.” Mannix’s breathing had gotten just the littlest bit rough. “Major Marquis Warren's not gonna be outwitted by some—some fucking white boy. Ain't nobody gets the drop on Major Marquis.”

“I’ve smartened you up some, haven’t I? If you know that. So here it is winter, and I’ve got the son of Erskine Mannix, Mannix’s Marauders, right at the end of my pistol. What do you do, Chris? You want to beg me for your life?”

“Like you’d fucking listen,” Mannix said, and bold as brass, he pulled the sheet back, spat in his palm, and closed his hand around Warren’s dick. He leaned forward and kissed him: he tasted like cheap whiskey, the kind that burned, the kind that made a man blind. They’d been drinking out of the same bottle. They both had that on their tongues. He pulled Mannix forward, rubbing the length of Mannix’s cock down his own, but Mannix pushed back just a little, said, “Let me take care of you, Major, let me make it up to you. Be so fucking good for you, I swear.”

He hesitated, but they’d already gone further than he’d ever intended for them to go. He hadn’t intended for them to end up like this at all. It seemed beside the point to mind the look in Mannix’s eyes now, so he nodded and Mannix kissed him again; moved to better his balance.

Mannix stroked him—a steady kind of pulse of desire. “So here it is winter,” he said, “and here you’ve got me, and here you’ve got your gun.” He put his other hand on Warren’s chest, pushed his fingers through the rough hair there, trigger-pulling finger scratching him just a little. “So you make me strip down, and I do it slow, trying like hell to hold on to any little bit of time, but you just snap your fingers at me. But what you don’t know, black major, sir, is I ain’t trying to stay warm, no, sir. Looking at you, I’m as warm as can be.”

He changed positions, tightened his thighs with Warren’s cock up between them and moved on him that way. Warren got a hand on him too, because it only seemed fair, and then he decided he didn’t give a shit about fairness: he wanted Mannix’s mind to be on talking and not on his own dick. So he let go and Mannix just fucking grinned at him like he’d expected that the whole time. Meanwhile he kept on rocking himself, doing all the work with so much damn fervency anybody would've thought he was the one getting off on it instead of the one with dick lonesomely untouched while he did Warren's thrusting for him, brought himself up and down the whole length of Warren's cock, everything hot and spit-slick.

“I’m looking at you,” Mannix went on, “and I don’t give a shit about any kind of bounty and I don’t even give a shit about _living_ , Major, you’re all I want in the world and I’m hard—hard as a fucking diamond. I don’t even know what I want.”

“Because you’re a dumbass,” Warren said, feeling the need to show he could still think, could still string a sentence together even with all this going on. He reached up and grabbed Mannix’s hip hard enough to bruise and pulled him down, pulled him closer, until the angle was exactly what he wanted. “There you go. Like that.” He pushed Mannix's sweaty hair up off his forehead. “I have to teach you everything, Chris?”

Mannix jerked his hips forward and Warren bit off a groan and there was that fucking grin again.

“Not _exactly_ everything, Major. But you’re throwing me off. I thought you wanted a real pretty story.”

He nodded, maybe just a little out of breath, but if he didn’t say a word he wouldn’t have to hear that and know it for sure.

“I don’t even know what I want,” Mannix said, “if I want to beg to suck your cock or let you scratch my face up with your fucking beard or just get my hands on you all over, and that ain’t even getting into what I want you do with me, what I know right away I’d let you do, which is fucking—which is fucking _everything_. And you laugh—you just laugh at me.” He hitched himself forward again and Warren took hold of him for good this time. Mannix’s creativity could only go so far, after all, given the brains he had to work with, and the last thing Warren wanted was for him to end up trailing off into not knowing what happened next, some shitty newspaper serial without an ending. And he liked, better than he’d ever want to admit, the way their ragged breathing sounded when they were both nearing the finish line at the same damn time.

“I can’t help you being funny,” Warren said. “Even with your mouth shut.”

“You put your pistol barrel right up on my forehead,” Mannix said, and Warren wasn’t even sure Mannix could hear him anymore, which should have pissed him off—since all this was supposed to be for him—but he liked that, too, liked that even without really trying he drove Mannix to distraction to the point where he got glassy-eyed with obsession. “And you say—and you say that if I suck your cock and I do it real well, do it better than the hillbilly before me or the hillbilly before him or any whore you ever had, if I do all that, well, you still won’t let me down off the fucking mountain, but maybe if I suck your cock that well you’ll let me suck it again.”

Warren lifted his ass up off the bed, thrust up, and came like that, both his hands going to Mannix's ass to hold him in place while he rode that out, feeling like it just might kill him, get Mannix that bounty after all. Mannix not closing his eyes, not even looking away from him, like this was what he’d been talking about, like Warren was gonna award him a blue ribbon at the end of it. He pushed Mannix off him and Mannix rolled onto his side, the two of them facing each other, and it would have been an uncomfortable kind of lull if Mannix hadn’t still been hard, which at least gave them something to concentrate on. He pressed his thigh up against Mannix’s and Mannix took hold of his shoulders and rubbed up against him. It was a little bit of a sight, Mannix humping his hard cock right up against Warren’s softened one, Warren’s spunk still drying on his legs and his balls, Mannix starting to get a desperate kind of look on his face because he couldn’t seem to get the right friction.

Frustration had tightened his mouth and it relaxed only when Warren kissed him, which he did mostly because of what Mannix had said about Warren’s beard scratching him. He wanted that look Chris got sometimes afterwards, when he looked rubbed-raw all over, his face pink from beard burn, his dick overworked and sore, and skin red and hot to the touch.

He pulled back and put his hand around the back of Mannix’s head. “I suppose I’d let you live.”

“Hell, Major,” Mannix said, going back to his semi-helpless thrusting, moving now in a forlorn kind of way like he had no hope of getting it right but like he just couldn’t stop himself from twitching, “with a generous offer like that, I’d give away five thousand dollars every day of the fucking week,” and so Warren took him in hand and finished him off, Mannix coming right up on Warren’s belly and then shaking hard like a horse that had been run all night and half the morning.

“I don’t suppose I’d kill you for anything under a grand,” Warren said, “which is saying something.”

“It sure is.” Mannix wiped him clean with the sheet and then rubbed it over his own self; then he moved his thumb back and forth across Warren’s stomach where his come had been like he was trying to memorize the spot he'd been lucky enough to mark. He looked like he was about to say something else and then he stopped, his cheeks a hot shade of pink.

Warren himself could have said other things, but didn’t, because he was the smarter one. Smart enough to stop his head from doing the impossible math on how much it _would_ take for him to get rid of this fucking white boy. He kicked the sheet further down since it was warm enough they didn’t need it, and it’d spare him some steaming-up in the middle of the night when Mannix worked his way over to his side of the bed as he sure enough always did, even when it was hotter than Hades. One of these days Warren really was going to stop him, even if he didn’t let himself try to come up with a figure on that score either.


End file.
